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Sacred Synchronisities

Enjoyed a relaxing morning in Half Moon Bay and met up with Edmundo Larenas, the chair of the San Mateo Surfrider chapter. He was on his way to Morro Bay for the Coastal Commission meeting to advocate for the Executive Director Dr. Charles Lester to remain in his position as one of the few anti-development voices in the commission. The word on the street is that the other commissioners wanted to fire him to be able to say yes to developers and yes to more $ in their pockets. The Coastal Commission decides if areas get developed or protected.

Over a thousand activists coalesced in Morro Bay and spoke up to save the California Coast. Sadly, by a 5-7 vote, Lester was fired. This puts the future of the untouched California coastline up in the air but also unites activists to watch the commission closer than ever.

Biking from Half Moon Bay to SF was beautiful and interesting. Its crazy to feel the energy shifting from the wild rugged coast to the city. While riding through the mountains is physically challenging, mentally it is incredibly peaceful and serene. There is no getting lost because there is only one road and I can stop off where ever I wish to pee, drink some water and rest. While mostly flat, the city presents its own challenges of getting lost, the abundance of cars and figuring out where I can keep my bike safely..

So far I have always got to my destination As I began riding out of golden gate park, I was nervous about finding my way around the city. I started talking with the cyclist next to me, a young woman named Margo who grew up in Oregon and moved to the city last year. She showed me “the wiggle”, a green bike way through the city avoiding hills and taking me exactly where I needed to go! Feeling held and embraced by all the angels around me! Thank you Margo!

Met up with my girlfriend from high school Julia Li and stayed at her place in the mission. It was so wonderful re-kin-necting with her and hearing all about her life in SF. She has some gnarly stairs entering her apartment and getting all my gear and bicycle up them was a task! 😉

Day 9:

Biked to Mill Valley over the Golden Gate Bridge this morning to interview Bea Johnson, author of Zero Waste Home . I borrowed her book from the library a couple years ago and it inspired me on my journey of zero waste living and simplifying my life.

On my tour I have been using an App that Bea created called BULK. It is an interactive map application for smartphones that shows people where the closest bulk food location is to them for zero waste shopping while on the road. It has SAVED me on my zero waste bike tour and I am so grateful that this awesome app is completely free! Talking with her I found out that apps are expensive to manage if they are free due to the constant updating of phones. Her and her family and poured over $5,000 into the app to keep it going but it’s getting difficult for them to do it all by themselves. So right now she has an indie-go-go campaign to #SaveTheBulkApp and she can use all the help she can get! Please check it out and support the Zero Waste Movement! 🙂

I am grateful and stoked my zero waste idol turned out to be so down to Earth and sweet! She loved my bicycle and told me her story of biking from SF to LA with her husband and two boys last year! We bonded over our love for finding cool things while picking up trash and she told me about her local reuse store that she borrowed her biking gear from for her tour. I have a full interview with her and will share with you all at the end of my journey in my video so stay tuned! 🙂

Biking away from Mill Valley I was singing to myself and smiling super big! While riding through Sausalito I heard someone calling my name, I look over and see my friend Heidi Harmon from SLO had pulled over her car to say hi! Both of us were so shocked to see each other we just kept hugging and laughing! haha She was on her way to see Pussy Riot, a Russian feminist punk rock protest group based out of Moscow.

Kept on riding and made my way over the Golden Gate for the second time, watching the sunset over the pacific, I ran into my northbound bike tour buddy Tito! He gave me a hard time for going south across the golden gate, saying that Oregon is the other direction. haha!

Small world and we are all kin-nected.. as if it couldn’t get even smaller I was biking back through the city back and heard someone say, “ Yeah! Zero waste bike tour” when I was waiting at a stop sign…what!?! Surprised I turned around and met a sweet guy named Owen who used to live in SLO and follows my blog! Such a trip! Loving all the sacred synchronisities of this trip! 🙂

Day 10&11:

Packed up my life again and made my way to Pier 96 to get a tour of SF’s Recycling Center.

Robert Reed was the guide for me and a group of foreign dignitaries from Italy, Canada, Switzerland touring this beast of a “recycling” center. 630 tons of materials are processed here daily, most of it paper. So many resources are extracted and used Tons of cardboard from the excessive amount of online shopping.

Localization is again a cure for this outsourced online consumerism. The boxes/packaging are made from cut down trees, trucked to lumber mills, processed into paper to be shipped to be packed with something to be shipped to be sold at a store or sold to an online customer. When you could buy/share something with someone in your local community and make a new friend!

While recycling is branded as an “eco” action, in reality it is a huge PR campaign to keep us from thinking about source reduction. Recycling perpetuates our single-use disposable culture and wastes tons of resources in every step of the process. While recycling is a last resort for materials the first is what the Earth naturally does, Compost! Recology has a waste zero goal and has the largest compost program in the country. Composting 650 tons every day, they have a program that gathers all the food scrapes from restaurants and homes.

Robert Reed, compost advocate, tour guide and my host for a couple nights showed us all this beautiful video about the importance of compost and healthy soil for a healthy planet. After the tour we all shared lunch at the Recology office, while everyone else was in a suit and tie I was sporting my tie-die tour outfit and backwards hat. 😉

I had a wonderful time staying with Robert, his daughter August, and two dogs Lucky & Peanut. We shared a nice dinner with Robert’s friend Mark over looking the city and talked about the revolution out of our bank & tank economy and into a sharing one. Mark said when he was young he thought the revolution was a sprint, as he got older he thought it was a marathon and now he realizes its a relay race, passing the baton to a younger generation.

Day 12: Rode out early in the morning to meet up with another girlfriend from high school, Christine Liu. She lives in Berkeley where she is getting her masters in neuroscience, my plan was to stay with her for a few days but then I found out I couldn’t ride my bicycle across the Bay bridge! They are working on creating a bike path but won’t have it done for at least another year. So X-tine and I met at the beautiful Rainbow Grocery of SF. I could have spent hours there…it had the largest bulk section i’ve ever seen!! Pre-made food galore all in bulk! Christine is also an activist working with homeless people and the ever growing issue of gentrification. So awesome to re-kin-nect with my old friend and still be on the same wave length when it comes to our generation standing up for a better world.

Said see you later to SF and rode across the golden gate for the third time. Fell in love with a the sweet little town of Fairfax up the valley from SF, a place where chain stores are not allowed and mountain biking was invented! They even had a museum all about bicycles, The Marin Museum of Bicycling, where I met Marc & Lena, sweethearts and bicycle enthusiasts!

After climbing a big hill I rode into Forest Knolls, home of revolutionary artists Richard and Judith Lang. Since 1999 they have been picking up trash off Keyhoe beach in the Point Reyes national seashore and creating incredible works of art!

They live in a magical faerieland on top of a big hill overlooking a redwood forest. They showed me their beautiful garden, art studios and their trash art barn at the bottom of the hill. The lady bug medicine was strong at their place and they told me that its the lady bugs time of year.

Check out their story in this video.

Their home overflows with creativity and fun! They have art everywhere and showed me their catalogs of pieces they have made all over the world to spark conversations about waste and consumerism. Judith even knitted her wedding dress out of plastic bags!! Inspired and stoked on their art and joyful spirits!

They invited me to stay the night and shared stories with me about the 60s, the back to the land movement, anti-war and civil rights. Watching Vietnam on the screens in their homes, the news reporting deaths and friends coming back in body bags, people were out in the streets enraged and advocating for a healthy planet.

Richard grew up in DC during all the protests of Vietnam and told me about the revolutionary leader Abbie Hoffman.

“Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.” – Abbie Hoffman

My question is, what happened? We have the same things happening now the permaculture movement, anti-war and black lives matter….but we also have a distracted and disempowered culture brainwashed by ads, technology, etc telling us that everything will be okay as long as we go shopping…..Back then the war was on the television screen of everyones home, the revolution was more up front and personal. Today its hardly recognized in our culture of distraction and advertisments… I think its up to my generation, the #reGeneration , to get back in the streets, take back the media and revolutionize our failing system.

So grateful to be friends with Richard & Judith, two angels of the Earth sharing their love and creative talents with the world!

How do you think we will change the system and create a loving and just world? Comment below. 🙂

xo SB ❤

PS

Here is an inspiring documentary about the roots of Greenpeace and the 60s/70s revolutionary spirit.